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inadequate.”
    “That’s what he does to everyone.”
    “Perhaps he should look out in case somebody kills him  …”
    I immediately regretted saying that. She frowned, and then turned away. “I still love him, you know.”
    I tried to make up for it. “Of course you do. And I’m sorry.”
    “I’ve tried to imagine life without him,” she said. “I’ve tried to imagine what it would be like if he … if he just weren’t there … if he just went away. But …”
    “But he doesn’t go away.”
    “No.”
    “And you wouldn’t want that, anyway, would you?”
    She shook her head.
    “You need him, I suppose. Your life would be very different if it weren’t for him.”
    She looked at me reproachfully. “It’s not just his money …”
    “I didn’t mean that,” I said quickly.
    “Does it matter to you that … that I’m rich?”
    “I thought people with money never used that word. And no, it makes no difference.” I stared at her. She looked miserable. “You said that it didn’t matter to you that I didn’t have a penny to my name. Well, same for me, the other way round.”
    It was a strangely intimate conversation, this talk of fathers and money. I bent down to kiss her. She opened her lips. We kissed twice, three times and then we heard the train approaching. We were still a short distance from the station, and so we disengaged and ran the last little distance. The wheels of the train made a strange sound as it approached—a ringing, humming sound, like the sound of metal strings being played with a great bow; or the sound made by a massive singing bowl, one of those brass bowls that Tibetan monks have and that resonate when the rim is rubbed with a finger. A note is emitted thatstretches off into the musical distance, sending shivers up the spine; a train and a singing bowl and a sky above that was still light, but fading and bore witness to the feelings I had for her. I wanted to say, Forget your father; just forget him. Come with me. We’ll go away. Away from him and all of this .
    What would she have said? I did not imagine that she would agree, as the bonds between father and daughter must surely be far stronger than anything I could offer her, who had known her for only a couple of weeks. But people don’t necessarily think that way when they are in love. The new lover, of a few weeks standing, may seem more precious than friends of decades. I felt like that about her.
    We returned to London. The next day at work, something very odd happened.

I WAS CALLED TO A MEETING WITH TWO OF THE senior members of my department. These were people I had met but not really had anything much to do with—one of them was on holiday when I had started and had only recently returned; the other had spoken to me once or twice, and had been polite enough, but had given me the impression that interns were, at most, a necessary nuisance—something one had to put up with.
    The more senior of the two, the one who had been on holiday, was called Eleanor; her colleague, the one who was unenthusiastic about interns, was called Geoffrey. Eleanor said to me that there was a small collection that had been consigned for sale and that needed cataloguing. It was not an important sale—day sales were reserved for paintings that would not be expected to attract the major buyers; paintings that might be good enough in their way, but that would never be talked about much or take a prominent place on the walls of galleries. They were goingover the ten paintings involved and would be happy for me to draft the initial catalogue entries. Of course they would have to approve the final text, but there would be a small amount of research that I could undertake. It was an advance on the proof-reading that I had done earlier on, and I accepted the task with gratitude.
    “The owner has a rather inflated idea of the importance—and value—of these paintings,” Eleanor said. “But everyone is like that, I suppose. All of us